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Music venues, dance stages and a world-class recital hall are among highlights of Australia’s newest educational building, which boasts zero noise and vibration despite its location on top of a noisy bus port and two railway tunnels in the heart of Perth.
The new Edith Cowan University City Campus opened its doors to students this week, while making history as the first university campus located in Perth’s CBD.
The $853 million, 11-storey building will also be the new home of ECU’s prestigious Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, which has trained several generations of actors and musicians including Hugh Jackman, Eddie Perfect, Tim Minchin, Lucy Durack and Lisa McCune.
Design leader Neil Appleton, from Lyons Architecture, says ECU City Campus is “probably the biggest building of its kind” in Australia.
“We’ve been in the educational space for 30 years, and we’ve never seen one this large,” says Appleton, whose architectural firm also designed the Australian Catholic University in Melbourne and a large campus building in Bankstown for Western Sydney University.
“What’s amazing about the ECU project is that it started with a visionary idea from the university to represent the collision between business, technology and creativity,” he said.
Nestled inside the building, sharing teaching spaces and “open plan” floors with WAAPA’s arts undergraduates, will be the university’s business, law and cybersecurity schools.
“There was a great opportunity to pursue a much larger idea about creativity, entrepreneurship and connections with industry,” says Appleton.
“It’s designed like a mini city where there are streets and laneways in the air. You can peek a look at the work inside classrooms, and view activity from the outside.”
ECU vice chancellor Clare Pollock says the City Campus is “one of the most extraordinary spaces that is investing in the creative and performing arts … I don’t know anywhere else in the world that a university campus is making that the central theme.”
She says that ambition is reflected in the 400-square-metre high-resolution LED screen that wraps around the main interior foyer, with digital content to be designed and programmed by ECU’s student designers and performers.
Even the building’s massive exterior has LED-illuminated ‘fins’ across the façade for multi-storey light display.
Zero noise and zero vibration were prerequisites for WAAPA’s new world-class recital hall, five theatres, rehearsal rooms and stages with flooring adapted to different dance forms.
“It took an army of creatives, architects and engineers to do it,” admits Appleton.
“We adopted the box-in-box strategy where there’s a completely isolated performance box inside a structural box. It’s effectively a finely tuned instrument inside a prosaic structure, vibration-isolated using springs.”
More than 100 Yamaha pianos are being installed in music booths; occupying its own suite is the Aboriginal Performance Studio (which has produced screen actors like Lila McGuire, currently starring in the ABC TV series Goolagong).
The Beck Square Piano, part of a collection of priceless historic pianos and 130 donated antique instruments, will also find a home in the city campus.
The Perth public will be invited to attend 300 performances and concerts throughout the year.
“Our brand new performance space and state-of-the-art facility will ensure WAAPA continues its place at the forefront of performing arts training, both nationally and internationally,” says WAAPA’s executive dean David Shirley.
Jointly funded by the federal and state governments and ECU, the 65,000-square-metre campus building is also intended to bring more residential life to Perth’s CBD, attracting a community of more than 10,000 students and staff.
“The sense of Perth city in the evenings and weekends doesn’t yet feel as full as you would find in Melbourne,” says Appleton.
“As the capital furthest away from any other city, it’s doing pretty well but I think the building will accelerate growth.”
ECU’s City Campus will formally start its first semester next week. Pollock says it will mark a new era of campus activity in Australia.
“We’re saying we are putting the arts into the centre of what we do as an organisation. That’s an extraordinarily powerful message for the university, for Perth city and for the country.”
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Victoria Laurie is a senior reporter and feature writer who has written for Good Weekend, The Australian, The Bulletin, The Monthly, HQ, Australian Geographic and The Weekend Australian Magazine.From our partners
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